this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Hi all, I'm just getting my feet wet in self hosting and have a plan to start with Nextcloud on a Pi 4 for photo backups, and then try other things for calendar, phone backups, media hosting, etc.

One thing I worry about is losing my data. I have heard "if it's not backed up in two locations, it's not backed up." I'm curious what all of you do for backing up the setup. Remote backup to hard drives in the garage? Pay for cloud backup and encrypt it? Just another backup site over wifi in the house?

I'd be most afraid of losing photos and if there were a house fire or something. So my inital thought was a way of backing up to a server in my detached garage in a weather resistent container, but I want to know what you all think. Thanks for any insight.

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[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

My friend who lives a thousand miles away swaps hard drives with me that are backups of critical stuff. He keeps my data, I keep his. As others have said your garage is a start but you really want some sort of geographically separate backup.

[–] loopy@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago

That’s a really interesting idea. That makes me think it would even be better in the sense that the data would be protected rather than risk a cloud service going out of business or changed their storage location. Not that that is a likely scenario but still.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Just for the sake of conversation, I recently did some crude math on this. I have few friends around who are well capable of running a backup server for me (hardware maintenance and stuff is always needed anyways) and at first it seemed like a good plan. Just get a 4TB SSD/NVME and throw that on a Raspberry Pi (or something small to keep electricity consumption low and setup silent), set up encryption, connect that to my network with wireguard or some other VPN and let it do it's thing.

But I'd need to purchase everything as setting up a remote location with old hardware is just asking for trouble. The drive alone is 300€ (give or take) and the rest is easily another 100€. Currently my storagebox costs ~10€/month for 5TB. Even if I scored a fantastic black week offer and got everything for -50% discount that hardware with multiple single point of failures would cost nearly 2 years worth of cloud backups. And I'd still owe at least few beers to the friend for the trouble.

Your mileage may obviously vary, there's a million different scenarios, but for me with my current setup it just makes sense to pick couple cloud providers and let them store my bits instead of getting more hardware to maintain and upgrade.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

For my buddy and I our critical data doesn't change often so once or twice a year when we get together we swap drives again. Simple spinning discs for us. No need for hardware or anything to keep them running. They just sit on a shelf just in case something happens we can hand it back to pull the data back onto a running server